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The New Honors Program: Discovery, Discernment & Drive

This story is featured in the Spring 2017 edition of the HPU Magazine, headed soon to a mailbox near you. Discover below how HPU’s Honors Scholar Program complements HPU’s liberal arts curriculum and prepares students for post-graduate work.

They take classes that help them develop, as one student says, “thoughts beyond thoughts.” They do research, put together projects, go on trips and organize their own clubs. In the process, they find their community, they find their own.

They talk about everything from poetry to politics way past midnight and use the fourth floor lobby of York Hall, the honors residence hall, as a clubhouse where they create intellectual exercises that let their minds play.

Last fall, the Honors Scholar Program expanded.

Students were given more honors classes to choose from and saw more teams of professors across disciplines collaborating together for courses that teach students the necessary habits of an inquisitive mind.

Honors scholar students take courses that combine ideas from various academic disciplines to show how knowledge can connect.

By the time they’re seniors, they have an electronic portfolio and research experience with professors.

Then, at graduation, they walk across the stage with a medallion around their neck for All University Honors, the highest academic honor a student can receive.

They write, present and collaborate with classmates, refining the very skills companies want and employees need in today’s global economy.

This fall, all of that will begin in a new home.

Honors scholar students will move their headquarters to Finch, a residence hall undergoing a renovation.

They’ll have roommates, a communal kitchen, a new faculty-in-residence and a seminar room for their regular intellectual programs.

But it’s bigger than that. It’s the symbolism of it all.

Finch Hall sits in the middle of campus beside the Kester International Promenade and the statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

And as the program continues to grow, Carpenter sees the location as indicative of what HPU values — intellectual curiosity, intellectual risk-taking, intellectual growth. With HPU’s honors scholars, that does take root.

The Discovery of Drive

The recast honors program is five years in the making. Its aim: Recruit and prepare students for post-graduate work and complement the school’s liberal arts curriculum.

It also gives students the intellectual vigor to go after some of the world’s best scholarships, from Roosevelt to Rhodes.

Right now, the Honors Scholar Program has about 260 students. Carpenter says they hope to get about 100 more every year — students who feel just like senior Sam Entwistle.

Entwistle first learned about business at age 9 by running the cash register at her mom’s Hallmark store in Tewksbury, New Jersey.